Daily Nanny

The Daily Nanny app was designed to help improve communication between parents and their nannies. Despite having no prior experience developing mobile apps, the Daily Nanny team was able to quickly bring the app to life for both iOS and Android using NativeScript.

Challenge

A nanny’s job often involves leaving the house, so Daily Nanny needed to be designed from the ground up to be a mobile application. However, the Daily Nanny team had no experience developing for mobile.

Solution

With NativeScript, the Daily Nanny team was able to build a cross-platform application using a shared code base. This made the development process much easier to manage between the iOS and Android platforms.

Result

Despite being the company’s first mobile project, the development of the Daily Nanny app was a quick and seamless affair—even with all the complex features and functions included in the application.

Story

Daily Nanny App Developed in Half the Time with NativeScript

Challenge

Returning to work after having a child can be difficult. For many parents, leaving their children at daycare or with nannies is a stressful prospect, regardless of the reputation of the caregiver.

After facing this challenge themselves, Dave and Jen Coffin founded Cubby Notes, a company dedicated to improving the communication between parents and caregivers and improving the overall level of care for children. Cubby Notes is a web-based application that enables daycare centers to send photos, notifications and messages to parents to keep them up-to-date on the wellbeing of their children. In addition to messaging and photo sharing, the application can also be used to log and track various activities, such as how long their children are napping each day and how much they are eating.

The application was originally designed for use at daycare centers. As the reputation of the application spread, the Cubby Notes team saw an opportunity to help those who employ nannies for childcare as well. While a web application is adequate for daycare centers, a mobile application was needed to better fit the job requirements of nannies. The ability to share important information about kids, share and comment on photos, and message their caregivers in real time would help keep parents’ minds at ease throughout the day. Plus, being able to track nanny hours and activities through the app would also be a major convenience.

Solution

Dave, who is responsible for the coding and development of Cubby Notes applications, decided to use NativeScript® to build the new mobile app for nannies—Daily Nanny. Dave knew he wanted an application that delivered a truly native experience, which is why he opted for NativeScript over the other options he initially explored.

Going into the project, Dave didn’t have much experience developing for mobile platforms. He is a frontend web developer by trade and the prospect of learning multiple languages to create apps for both iOS and Android was daunting. The fact that NativeScript enabled Dave to write and deploy native mobile apps for iOS and Android from a single codebase was a big asset in that regard, since he didn’t have to learn multiple languages for each platform. He could also reuse the JavaScript and CSS skills he already knew to start putting the app together immediately.

The NativeScript community was a great resource for Dave as well. Whenever he encountered a challenge, he could simply hop into the NativeScript Slack channel and find the answer he needed. He also picked up Typescript after the community suggested he do so, which helped improve the development process.

Results

The development of Daily Nanny was a relatively seamless process. The new app expanded on the foundation of the daycare web application, with the addition of several new features such as shift management, payment calculation and schedule planning—it was an extensive application, especially considering it was Dave’s first foray into mobile development.

NativeScript enabled Dave to save a lot of time in development, particularly since he was getting native performance out of the box. “If I were to do this project using Xcode, it would have taken five times longer to get the iOS app out—and that’s not even mentioning the Android app.”

The iOS version hit the market first, but the Android version followed soon after—one of the benefits of developing the app with NativeScript.

“Because I’m an iOS user, I worked on that version first,” Dave said. “I thought getting the Android version of the app running would be a nightmare because I had really neglected it during development, but once I fired it up, it was simple. Way simpler than I thought."

Now that Daily Nanny is live, Dave is looking forward to developing more applications with NativeScript. He’s already begun work on native iOS and Android apps for the original daycare web application and there are always new areas in the childcare sector to cover as well.

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